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Some illuminated manuscripts seem as untouched and unchanged today as they must have at their creation. The Carew-Poyntz Hours is not such a manuscript. Begun in the middle of the fourteenth century, its leaves were gradually illuminated, its images defaced, and its devotional programme upended over the next hundred years. I argue that the result of its abortive first campaign was malleability, the potential for creative and re-creative material and devotional changes. Although the patrons’ names are lost, their physical interactions with the book reveal much about their identities. Ultimately, it was this appearance of a work-in-progress that inspired several generations of medieval people to manipulate the Carew-Poyntz Hours.
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